Beijing humanoid startup Galbot used the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on July 20 to run a full-day gauntlet of demos with its general-purpose Galbot G1 and heavy-duty Galbot S1, from making breakfast and running an autonomous retail stand to stacking mixed pallets and tightening millimetre-scale screws.
G1: Breakfast, Retail And City-Scale Deployments
On the G1, Galbot ran a breakfast-making challenge in which the robot toasted, poured drinks and coordinated its dual arms despite continuous external interference. In a second demo, iPad shoppers ordered items and the G1 retrieved bread, marinated eggs, plastic bottles and jelly cups from densely stocked shelves. Both flows are powered by Galbot's AstraBrain embodied intelligence model, which uses a 'brain-cerebellum-neural control' architecture to fuse multimodal perception, long-horizon planning and real-time execution.
Already Deployed In Pharmacies And 'Galaxy Capsules'
The retail demos are backed by two commercial deployments already in the field. A smart-pharmacy solution built with partners now runs across hundreds of instant-retail warehouses in dozens of cities, handling 24/7 medicine retrieval, packing and dispatch. And Galbot's 'Galaxy Capsule' – a city-level embodied intelligence terminal centred on the G1 – has been installed at more than 170 sites across 40+ Chinese cities.
S1: Depth For Heavy Industry
If the G1 shows the breadth of embodied intelligence, the S1 shows its depth. The heavy-duty humanoid carries a 50 kg per-arm payload and, in the WAIC demo, recreated a factory workflow of de-palletizing, transporting and re-stacking boxes without precision fixtures, relying solely on vision for centimetre-level grasps. In a second task, the S1 identified millimetre-scale screws against complex backgrounds, aligned them into holes and drove them home with an electric screwdriver. Galbot says the S1 has now been running on Chinese factory lines continuously – including CATL production – for more than three months without interruption.
Automotive Partners Line Up
Alongside CATL, Galbot said SAIC, BAIC, Bosch and Hyundai have all formed deep partnerships with the company, covering everything from EV battery lines to full vehicle assembly. That places Galbot alongside Xiaomi and other Chinese entrants pushing embodied AI onto the factory floor, and complements simultaneous WAIC unveilings from rivals such as MagicLab and Mech-Mind.
Reporting based on coverage from Gasgoo Auto News.